The Listeners Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  Copyright Page

  For Diana and Greg

  and in memory of our uncle Tony

  THE CLERK HAD two thumbs on his left hand. One was normal, the other a nub of flesh and nail sprouting from the foot of the normal one. Out of politeness I tried not to look at it, but every time I bought cigarettes there came a moment when he turned and I could watch the second thumb. It seemed to possess a kind of intelligence. A wise baby tentacle with powers of its own.

  I asked how he was doing.

  “Half a damn foot more tonight,” he said, “if you believe the radio.”

  The sidewalks were hard little white seas. Built on a swamp, our city was not good at handling winter. Twice as long to walk to the subway, and the train platform slick with melt. The man beside me was wet-coughing. When he spat into his sleeve, I shut my eyes. And hold your breath when the doors open or the tunnel germs will get into your lungs and grow like lichen. We are all the way under the earth. We are how many leagues down?

  Snowflakes salted the early dark, the street a white field cut by tires and boots. A siren, laughter, throbs of music from the takeout. Our mother thought my brother’s apartment was too loud, not guessing that Riley used the noise for company. Snow was an ear feather. Airplanes blinked in the sky. A car radio said a car bomb had killed three American soldiers, and the buzzer threw blue veins up the wall.

  “Hello,” crackled his little intercom voice.

  What the dickens was he wearing? A sackcloth over pale denim, and canvas sneakers—I was regularly impressed by the ghastliness of his wardrobe. The apartment was neat as a new pin, or a German barracks. Couch pillows all plump and straight, can of dried flowers in the corner, table with nothing on it but the expensive type of candle. It made me want to take a dump on the floor.

  “Nice dirndl,” I said.

  “Shut up, thank you.”

  “Took a new one?”—nodding at a tiny frame hung up, a prune-eyed woman in hectic scarves.

  Riley smiled at his sneakers. “Yeah that’s Mrs. Jones from downstairs.”

  “The fake fortune-teller?”

  “You don’t know if she’s fake,” my brother said quietly.

  We were late but safe together: the meal couldn’t start without us. Mert would have fussed a little over the table, gotten out place mats. Lawyers and salesclerks, custodians and telemarketers, all rumpled from the day—we sidestepped them. As usual I imagined the destinations of strangers to be firmer than my own. They all had real places to be, where real things happened. A bike messenger knocked Riley practically to the ground, but the poor slow flower wouldn’t think to give him the finger. My brother was a baby monk. He blinked a lot. He worked in a windowless office twenty feet below street level, and no matter the creepy chief or the loud-chewing receptionist or the smell from the break-room icebox, Riley loved it in that bunker. For eight hours a day his head was soft and loose, with tasks to absorb it, thick walls and controlled temperature and the breath of other archivists.

  Out of a coffee shop drifted a tinny song.

  “Come on,” he said.

  “Hold it,” I said. Them? One song on rotation at a corporate-bean megalith, you never needed to work again. And the members of that wormy outfit should’ve had to work until the very hour of their deaths—

  “What’s wrong?”

  “Ten-foot-talls,” I hissed.

  “Quinn, the bus… come on…”

  We ran, in our fashion. Neither of my lungs was in full operation, and Riley had virtually no muscle mass.

  “You need to quit smoking,” he accused as we sank down. “And what’s a ten-foot-tall?”

  “Bleh,” I said.

  We conjectured about the evening menu, agreeing it better not be veal, or Cornish hens that weren’t cooked all the way. We recalled the night Riley had complained about the blood and I said, Yeah, this is foul fowl! and Fod said nothing and Mert threw down a bowl of broccoli, which clattered but did not break. I am never cooking dinner for this family again, she announced. Then she sat, shook out her napkin, and forked a dripping red bite. Enough theatrics, Fod said. You think these are theatrics? she whispered—the whisper of trying not to scream. I refuse to prepare food night after night for people who do not appreciate it. But you’re not really going to stop, I reasoned. Believe me, our mother snapped, I am.

  “I vote for brisket,” said Riley now.

  “No, fish; and some kind of nutritious sea vegetable.” I added, “Oh to be on the road, when all you ingested was gummy bears and locally popular beverages.”

  “Yeah,” he said. Riley was a good-sport listener: he’d nod and murmur, the whole while thinking his own thoughts in a private chamber. I told the same stories over and over, and he never had the heart to point it out. Like when we picked up that deaf hitchhiker in Oregon. Like when we got attacked by feral turkeys in Ohio.

  The house on Observatory Place was a meek square of brick and blue wood, pots of dead geraniums on the porch, walnut branches a-scratch at the upper windows. I coughed to disguise my huffing from the hill, a hill that in high school had not challenged me at all.

  Riley slapped me on the back. “By the way.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Where’s my twenty?” he said.

  “Um, what?”

  “From last week. You said you were getting paid today.”

  I coughed louder, wiped my mouth. “You are correct, sir.”

  He paused on the porch steps, waiting.

  “Let me just find my wallet,” I told him.

  Indoors he said, “This looks great” because Mert had gone to the trouble of candles. Pork chops and mashed parsnips and brussels sprouts and a saucer, for me, of grilled tofu. Riley told about his horrible boss at the archives and how a coworker had yelled Lawsuit! when the boss stroked her cheek. When it was my turn to report, I poured another wine and said, “Same as usual, business very bad.”

  “Might be time to look elsewhere,” Fod said in the fake-casual voice.

  “I can’t ditch Ajax,” I reminded him.

  Mert, who was ashamed to have a daughter in her midthirties working in a bookstore (a used one, at that) cut in: “Squidlings, how about helping me with some cleaning next weekend? All that junk in the basement, there’s so much that really should be tossed…”

  I spooned a splotch of parsnip. Riley said okay.

  “Thank you, Coyote—Saturday morning?”

  I said, “You’re not getting rid of any of her stuff, though, right?”

  Mert said, “Want to come by at nine thirty?”

  I mouthed at him, Don’t throw her stuff away.

  “I have a funny thing,” Riley said when the silence had gotten long.

  “Yes, pettle?”

  “Well, I was in the supermarket looking at peanut butter and I had to read all the different labels because you know how most of them are so sugary but don’t need to be because—”

  “Get on with it,” I said.

  “Okay so I’m there, and I don’t think I looked particularly gloomy but this woman who I now remember as a wizened gypsy but could have been just a regular woman comes up and hands me a pamphlet. It had an orange sunset and big swirly letters and said: COMFORT FOR THE DEPRESSED. Take it, she said, it will help you.”

  “That’s disturbing,” said Fod.

  “No, it’s funny. All I was thinking about was peanut butter!”

  “You do look depressed, though,” I said.

  “Now, now—”

  “Admit it, Mert, his default expression is one of gentle despair.”

  “He has a very handsome face,” she said.

  “But it’s not
exactly merry or bright.”

  Throughout my brother’s life, gas-station attendants, ticket takers, and college professors had urged him: Come on, smile, it can’t be that bad!

  Fod grunted, “Who has anything to be merry about? The United States government is torching people’s human rights on a daily basis.”

  “Oh okay—”

  “Don’t give me that dismissive crap,” he told our mother. “You can turn your face to the wall, but that wall might get blown up by an AGM-114 Hellfire. Know why they’re called Hellfires? It’s an abbreviation. The official term for these delightful contraptions is Helicopter-launched fire-and-forget. Oops, pardon me, dreadful sorry, these missiles are so easy to use I forgot that I sent one into your child’s face yesterday—”

  “Thank you Masterpiece Theater. So Riley, what did you say to the woman at the store?”

  “Nothing. I mean, I probably said thanks.”

  “I would’ve told her to shove that sunset up her poon,” I remarked, reaching for the wine.

  THE FAMILY WAS five, its children born in the 1970s in a middle-income suburb of a medium East Coast city. The father was a tenured professor of organic chemistry and the mother taught English literature as an adjunct lecturer at the same university. They had met in graduate school, conceived the first kid not long after, and married three months before her birth. The middle child felt wholly a girl. The youngest wanted to be a girl because his sisters were. The oldest hovered between girl and boy, both, neither.

  The middle said: “Close your eyes so the germs don’t get in. This train has germs that love the eyes. They crawl through the whites and gnaw to the brain and swim down your blood to the heart.”

  “But I want to see,” said the youngest, “how it looks when we come out of the dark—when we’re up on stilts.”

  “That’s not for a while,” said the middle. “Close them.”

  The youngest did.

  “It’s worse to be gnawed in the heart than in the brain.” The middle lowered her voice away from the parents, who sat at the far end of the subway car. The oldest and the middle were starting to like to escape them in public, and the youngest, if he had to choose, always chose his sisters.

  “What does the brain matter,” whispered the middle, “compared with the heart?”

  The oldest opened her eyes before she was supposed to. She saw black walls rush past the glass. She watched a guy drum on a denim thigh some private song. Being alone with noise in your ears and an army-colored jacket and your hair all crazy was so much better than riding home with your family from the museum.

  “You can look now,” said the middle when the train had come up out of the ground. “Our municipal subway system,” she announced, “started being built in 1969 and was finished in 1976.”

  The youngest asked if during construction there had been explosions.

  Yes was the answer. And accidents. Many deaths.

  “Next stop, pettles!” called the mother.

  The oldest wished the parents would get off without them. She wanted to ride until sleepy and sleep until the train had reached a station she’d never been to, in a country she’d never seen.

  After the train, the walk, the removal of red and blue coats, they brought sloshing cups downstairs and stood a lit candle on the basement floor. The cherry juice made their teeth black, their tongues vampire. “If while at sea you got a fatal case of calenture—a distemper,” read the middle from her notebook, “peculiar to sailors in hot climates, wherein they imagine the sea to be green fields, and will throw themselves into it, if not restrained—would you rather drown alive or be shot by the captain?”

  “Shot,” said the oldest.

  “Drown,” said the youngest, “because then you might not drown but have a dolphin save you.”

  The middle shook her head. “This is in a part of the ocean,” she said, “where dolphins went extinct. Now do you guys know about the different ides?” She gleamed her I’ve-done-my-research smile, which according to their mother was not very becoming. “March is famous,” the middle explained, “as the month when ides should be wared of, but many perilous things have taken place on the fifteenth of February as well. For instance: on this day in 1961, flight 548 crashed in Belgium, killing seventy-three people, including every figure skater on the U.S. Olympic team. On the ides of February of this very year”—she paused for effect—“the drilling rig Ocean Ranger sank during a vicious storm off the Newfoundland coast, and eighty-four rig workers died.

  “But good things happened too,” she went on, “like Susan B. Anthony from the coin was born on this day in 1820. And Sir Ernest Shackleton popped from the womb on this day in 1874. He saved every last sailor from an icy death, although the sled dogs had to be killed. And on February 15, 1564, Galileo Galilei came into the world. He was the first to see craters on the moon.”

  TEN YEARS AGO, a man called Ajax who wore wooden jewelry gave me a job out of sheer kindness, and I’d worked at his bookstore ever since. I had never been the biggest reader, which worried me at first, but I learned to pony up convincing answers to customers on the shortest of notices. I could refer to writers so quickly and slur-rily that the customer would nod along no matter what I was saying. If an aficionado wanted to have an actual literary conversation, my eyelids would droop and I’d fiddle with the calculator until Ajax swooped in, with his genuine knowledge, to rescue.

  At lunch hour we had strawberry soda and cocoa patties from the Jamaican grill. Ajax bent over his newspaper while I paced the linoleum aisles. Our little graveyard lay in the shade, its shelves aburst with stories, bins packed with remains, bunting slung limp from the ceiling, and for hours at a time, for days on end, nary a customer. It was an improbable location for a bookstore, out here among the office blocks and furniture outlets and restaurants full at lunchtime of trembling chrome-haired ladies. Each stack of pages in its cardboard sleeve was a house, and in each house things happened without anyone knowing. The houses were dead because no one would read them again. We had our regulars and the mail orders, but both were measly.

  A spider clung to the net of flesh between my thumb and finger; my other hand flicked it off and pounded it flat on the scarred counter.

  Two boys strutted in, cold-faced sparks, their garb a tattered skin on spitefully thin limbs. It was a good thing their assflesh had been hacked away, or had never grown in the first place, because the britches didn’t have room for it. They were not so much pants as denim harnesses, sliced low, grazing the pubic bone. I had once relied on my own skinniness to pull off that kind of look.

  The taller spark asked, “You got any books by the guy who went to jail for building a half-pipe on Indian burial grounds?”

  I stared at him.

  “Do you?”

  “He only wrote one, and it’s garbage.” (In fact it probably was.)

  “Well do you have it?”

  “You might consider looking on the memoir wall.”

  “Whatever, lady.”

  Lady? Neither stripling had removed his fly-eye glasses. Lady? And now a girl, even younger than the boys, attractive in a cake-mix sort of way, strolled in. School must’ve just gotten out. Both waxy heads turned; they appraised her clinically as she leaned into the new arrivals table, shrugging off her pink wool coat.

  She left without buying anything. So did the sparks. The silence in the store was so huge I could hear every twist and shimmer of ring in my ears. I flicked on the radio, which stayed at talk stations—Ajax honored my no-music policy. Thought it was stupid, but honored it.

  Those kids should’ve known who I was. Even after all this time.

  Narcissus was a flower but was also a boy. The boy loved the sight of himself and so he loved water. The problem with Narcissus: oneself was only of limited interest. Sometimes, to ward off the tedium of Quinn, I went into the heads of people I knew. I was Geck; I was Riley; I was my smarter sister. I listened to their conversations. Watched them watch TV or make toast. I liked borr
owing their heads.

  I popped open a red can of chips, closed my eyes at the factory taste dear to me since childhood. The radio was listing war-death statistics, so I turned it back off. Silence, buzzing. For three seconds, the most I could stand, I made myself pretend I was deaf. This was how it felt: the flat hush unbroken by a single noise other than the hum in my canals. Riley would have to learn sign language.

  “THE TORPEDO IS a fish that if you touch while it’s alive, even with a long stick, your hand will go numb, perhaps forever. But if it’s dead you can eat it.” The middle looked up from her notebook. “So what would you do if the king commanded you to kill one?”

  “Shoot it with a rifle,” said the oldest.

  “Ask the king,” said the youngest, “if he could please command someone else.”

  THE BAR WAS its usual self, smudged mirror and crack-vinyled banquettes, idleness warming the air. Sparklers dressed to the teeth were chattering at every table. My spot on the end stool had been commandeered by some fellows who had the look of a band about them: their outfits were variations on a pinstriped theme, and their droopy haircuts matched, and their number was four. The one most likely to be the singer (shiniest hair, bonniest face) was telling the others: “I’m just gonna book it to South America, if so. No way I stick around to get slaughtered on a camel track.” He swung his polished locks, tipped beer into his mouth.

  “Me neither,” said the one who, fattest, would have been the drummer.

  “Yeah, fuck that they can’t institute a draft it’s the twenty-first century!” added the bass player, dumbest.

  Their eye-corners were unwrinkled, thighs spindly, they were killable. I watched them in the hot sand, these dapper four, a row of pinstriped puppies jerking and flopping in the bullet spray.

  Mink wiped the zinc and chewed a lime, worrying its pulp for last juices. She was sweating hard. She was letting the other girl fetch my drinks. When did she ever do that? Normally she was a good lieutenant, always had the new drink ready before being asked.